Toxicants

Evaluating the intensity of one’s feelings towards an emotional prospect is an unnerving process. This is it. This is where the horrendous truth of your gradual fading into someone else surfaces and strikes your denial in the nose. This is the moment.
In regular circumstances, the realisation does, and should, scare you shitless, but for me, and owing to my lack of cognizance at the time, I wasn’t scared enough.

I was smitten and I saw cartoonish stars that promised security, bliss, and good things. In my defense, there were no signs to ignore, all the red flags were dressed in white inviting attires demanding me, kindly, to give in. There is safeness, salvation, shelter; this is everything you’ve ever wanted.

The charming demon’s lips dripped of honey and poison. The poison tasted as sweet. I loved it all. There wasn’t a single element that aggravated me, and, had I been wiser, I would have found it suspicious. But the magic was blinding.

I think optimism is childish. I also think that the first grave disappointment of said optimism marks the death of said child. This is the story of how my childhood died.

We met on an angry Thursday. I call it angry because I always thought the sky mirrored God’s mood.
“Then God is always angry in England.” He giggled, when I once shared the above ‘theory’ out loud. I stared at him with nuisance. Cruelty made me physically sick. And ridiculing one’s naiveté was cruel.
“There are many gods, sweetheart, you think? Ones for coast cities, ones for the countryside, and others for Antarctica?”
“Maybe.”
“And do we pray to them all, or only the ones above our heads?”
“…I don’t know.”
“Do they visit and socialise? Do you think the clouds are so grim today because our God is lonely?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“What do you think, baby girl?”
I thought I didn’t love him anymore, but only for a fleet second. For the following days, I just didn’t love myself.

It would be unfair to solely blame my self-loathing on him. The weekly visits had the capacity to damage only those prone to damage. Desperate dreamy children make good victims. My mother insists I should have “at least said something,” but a child’s brain is too small, too pure, for big academia concepts like emotional abuse, and it seemed, at least for a while, that knights could do no wrong; only little princesses were stupid, only little princesses were unworthy.

I haven’t seen my father in 4 years. I don’t wish to. But today I spend the morning with a lover. The sky is still angry. His poison is still sweet. I’m still waiting for the horrendous truth to strike me in the nose.